This invention relates to a stump chipping disintegrator.
Clearing of wooded terrain for building construction or highway purposes has been greatly aided in recent years by the development of practical tree chipping equipment such as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,057,192, Re. 31,048 and 3,805,860 and brush chipping equipment as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,861,602. The trunks, limbs and tops of trees and brush can be chipped for fuel, paper manufacturing, chipboard fabrication and other uses. Alternatively, tree trunks can be separated for making lumber and plywood, while the branches and tops are chipped for fuel or the like.
Subsequently, the stumps are grubbed out of the ground and either piled up for burning or taken to landfills. Actually, both of these techniques for stump disposal are time consuming and expensive, and neither is environmentally satisfactory. Moreover, both are wasteful of natural resources. Specifically, piling and burning of stumps inevitably results in noxious smoke pollution. The stumps contain a great deal of moisture and dirt, and therefore are difficult to burn, so that burning usually involves adding considerable quantities of petroleum fuels, old tires and the like to encourage combustion. Even then, after many hours of effort and use of large equipment and attention, total combustion of the stumps is rarely accomplished.
Hauling stumps to landfills also requires extensive use of large machinery and hauling equipment. Further, more and more landfills are being closed in recent years due to environmental reasons. Operators of those remaining landfills often will not accept stumps for disposal. There is needed another effective way of dealing with these stumps. The present invention provides an effective way to chip stumps into chips useful as fuel, fabrication of paper or chipboard or otherwise. But stumps are extremely difficult to chip and destructive of machinery and often there are stones/rocks lodged in the roots, in addition to large quantities of dirt and the stump wood itself has roots extending in many directions, and differing grain patterns.
While the idea of chipping stumps on a drum chipper has been suggested previously in U.S.S.R. documents Kirov Forestry Ind. 17.10.77 SU-531940 and Kirov Timber Ind. 19.10.77 SU-536411, drum chippers are notorious for operational roughness, lack of effective feed control, formation of shredded product rather than uniform chips, and difficulty in replacement of blades, among others. As far as is known, no practical apparatus for disintegration of stumps has been developed heretofore, even though there has been a market for an effective stump disintegrator for some time. Information as to present efforts being conducted by others to chip stumps on presently available chippers indicates that equipment breakdown and/or blade destruction occurs in such a short time that known equipment is not at all practical.
Another wasted timber resource which presently exists is due to the inability to effectively harvest forest areas wherein large groups of trees have died out or have been downed as a result of forest fires, storm damage, or the like. For example, in many western states of the United States, thousands upon thousands of dead and/or downed trees, often several feet in diameter, are wasted because of no practical way to deal with them.